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Future iPhones May Offer More Realistic Lighting and Shadows with New Ray-Tracing GPU
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Apple already has an agreement with this company. It's quite possible we'll see it in the iPhone 6. Apple, which for years had some of the worst computers for gaming, seems to be really focusing on that market now.
I can't believe you guys didn't post this from their twitter
![iQL1L7x.png]()
The contrast in the rasterized image is overblown. The ray traced has a more accurate physical representation since its based on the actual physics of incident light sources.
The contrast in the rasterized image is overblown. The ray traced has a more accurate physical representation since its based on the actual physics of incident light sources.
It's a step in the right direction. But It will be a while (like 3+ years while) before we get to play any games using this technology on iOS devices.
Here's why:
1. Ray-Tracing is a very performance-intensive process. Building a hardware that supports this technology is one thing but making a game that works on this hardware is another. Give it about 2-3 years before the hardware is finally capable enough to run a game with Ray-Tracing.
2. Developers are not familiar with the technology. They know what it is but they never built a game that renders with Ray-Tracing. Also, many developers nowadays use a game engine (Unity, Unreal Engine) for easy cross-platform development. The Ray-Tracing support must be baked in these game engines before most developers start developing a game with them.
3. No AAA titles in 3+ years. Big developers care about one thing, the profit (EA?). They will only build a game for a platform that's worth their trouble. When you build a game today, your game should run on iPad 2 or iPhone 4. No big name developers will build a game that will only work on the latest iOS devices. The market is just simply not big enough.
It is however, a step in the right direction. It's more of a future-proofing (and a bone for the marketing team) than anything else.
Here's why:
1. Ray-Tracing is a very performance-intensive process. Building a hardware that supports this technology is one thing but making a game that works on this hardware is another. Give it about 2-3 years before the hardware is finally capable enough to run a game with Ray-Tracing.
2. Developers are not familiar with the technology. They know what it is but they never built a game that renders with Ray-Tracing. Also, many developers nowadays use a game engine (Unity, Unreal Engine) for easy cross-platform development. The Ray-Tracing support must be baked in these game engines before most developers start developing a game with them.
3. No AAA titles in 3+ years. Big developers care about one thing, the profit (EA?). They will only build a game for a platform that's worth their trouble. When you build a game today, your game should run on iPad 2 or iPhone 4. No big name developers will build a game that will only work on the latest iOS devices. The market is just simply not big enough.
It is however, a step in the right direction. It's more of a future-proofing (and a bone for the marketing team) than anything else.
One benefit is that ray tracing is much simpler in implementation because it's not rife with optimizations and tricks used in rasterization to approximate which surfaces are being hit with light and in what manner. It's because of those shortcuts that you can get an approximate solution with less resources. Ray-tracing is the holy grail because it's an actual physical representation of how light is behaving in the scene, it's just too computationally expensive to justify its use (until sometime in the near future hopefully). One would hope that simplicity makes development easier on the programmers.
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And we're one step closer to iOS devices taking over mobile gaming completely. (Albeit many steps remain.)
Millions. It's the promise of new consoles every generation. Imagine a stealth game where your dynamically cast shadow gives away your position/presence. Just one example.
Thanks! This indeed looks interesting. I am impressed by the technology, of course, but after browsing though the APIs and looking at the code of their sample, I am still unsure what to thing of it. It looks like a nice demo, certainly, but I'd like to know more about performance characteristics and usability in real applications. Looking from their rendering code, I don't see why they couldn't have used rasterisation based methods for soft shadows and occlusion - that would probably result in simpler and maybe even higher-performing code (in the demo they are doing a number of potentially very expensive synchronisation and copy operations).
Infinity Blade 3 came out in Sept. Maybe you want 4?
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Yeah, on your 4" screen.
To be fair, your example doesn't have much to do with ray tracing
People have been doing high-quality dynamic shadows with rasterisation for quite some time now.
I forgot that, in the future, all games are played on 4" screens. My bad.
To be fair, your example doesn't have much to do with ray tracing
There was one day where no games had that. Then one did. Just a point to show it's not all about being prettier.
It's built into the hardware, no longer a burden on the GPU to do or cheat and do with shaders. They have an API and it's being built into Unity 5 and will no doubt be added to other engines.
seriously ? who cares about "More Realistic Lighting and Shadows" on a phone screen ?
on a computer screen or a HDTV, ok, that makes sense
on a phone, seriously, i don't give a damn
i just want my apps to run smoothly and my phone to last more than a few hours before running out of juice
on a computer screen or a HDTV, ok, that makes sense
on a phone, seriously, i don't give a damn
i just want my apps to run smoothly and my phone to last more than a few hours before running out of juice
haha, such a smart marketing strategy article.
this can only fool people without CGI knowledge.
Ray Tracing is not even possible on desktop computers yet.
It's very computation intensive algorithm that can only found in CG movie and FX effects.
Dream on.
this can only fool people without CGI knowledge.
Ray Tracing is not even possible on desktop computers yet.
It's very computation intensive algorithm that can only found in CG movie and FX effects.
Dream on.
